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Plex opens its media cloud to all its Plex Plus users

Plex announced that its Plex Cloud media server service is now available for all Plex Pass users.

Plex unveiled its Plex Pass package nearly five years ago and now those customers have access to its cloud-based media server.

“The amount of technology behind this launch is quite awesome. It’s definitely not a trivial thing to take the best media server on the planet and make it work seamlessly as a scalable cloud service, load-balanced and clustered across multiple geographic regions,” the company said in a blog post, adding that it’s integrated Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive as cloud storage options as well.

The expansion of Plex Cloud’s availability comes not long after Plex made a play into video content by acquiring news service Watchup. The deal gave Plex access to content from 150 publisher partners including CBS, CNN, Vox, Euronews, Hearst Television, Tribune Media, Turner Broadcasting and McClatchy.

“People have to navigate a ridiculous number of interfaces and apps to get to their favorite content,” said Keith Valory, CEO of Plex, in a statement. “Our mission at Plex has always been to provide our users with one simple and personalized window into all of their media, accessible from any device. Adding a trusted and reliable news experience into Plex, so that people can choose and organize the news they care about along with the other content they care about, is a natural next step for us.”

Valory said that Plex bought Watchup instead of just partnering with it in order to gain access to Watchup’s technology that can be appled broadly to other content types.

“[Watchup has] a bunch of cool machine learning and artificial intelligence stuff that helps us personalize and get better at getting people what they want,” Valory told FierceOnlineVideo.

He also praised the somewhat “unsexy” capabilities that Watchup has built like hosting, transcoding and ingestion.

“[Watchup] has been very focused delivering the best news user experience,” said Valory, adding that more than 10% of Plex’s employees are dedicated to design and user experience.

Valory also praised the content experience of the Watchup team, which will now join Plex.